South Korea can attract more foreign investors but needs to first address worries they have about putting money in the country, a high-profile adviser to President-elect Lee Myung-bak said Sunday, according to AP. David Eldon, the chairman of the Dubai International Financial Center Authority, said openness, transparency, strong and consistently applied laws and «a level playing field» are requirements for drawing the attention of foreign capital. «These are all areas where potential investors say to me they are not certain about, as far as Korea today is concerned,» Eldon, a former chairman of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corp., the Asian arm of HSBC Holdings PLC, told reporters. Eldon was in South Korea to meet with transition team officials, as well as Lee, who was elected last month on a pledge to boost growth and create jobs in South Korea's economy, the world's 12th largest. The team advises the president-elect and helps him prepare to take office. His appointment as an adviser has drawn attention in South Korea, where suspicions about the aims of foreign investors run deep. Eldon's comments came as the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy announced Sunday that pledged foreign direct investment into the country fell 6.5 percent in 2007 to US$10.51 billion (¤7.12 billion), the third consecutive annual decline. Lee, a conservative former chief executive officer of Hyundai Engineering & Construction Co. with a reputation for achievement, won the Dec. 19 election by a wide margin. He has advocated boosting foreign investment. His election brings to an end 10 years of liberal control at the presidential Blue House, where fostering detente with communist North Korea was a key policy aim. Lee, who has promised to take a harder line on Pyongyang, is scheduled to take office Feb. 25. «The president-elect has made it, I think, very clear that he wants to open up the market for Korean companies moving overseas and also to allow other companies to do more business within Korea,» said Eldon, who has known Lee since his years as mayor of Seoul. Eldon said South Korean people must ultimately decide if they want a larger foreign role in their economy, adding that he believes Lee's election suggests they do. «I am very hopeful that we can make some serious achievements,» said Eldon, a native of Scotland and who spent 37 years with the HSBC Group in the Middle East and Asia. He suggested South Korea has suffered from the rush by foreign investors into neighboring China, and said efforts should be made to draw their attention to the country. «If you look at the next step from that at where else they should invest in Asia, Korea must be on their list of countries to look at,» Eldon said.
